1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for specifying services provided by a franking machine. It furthermore concerns relates to a corresponding arrangement for specifying services provided by a franking machine, corresponding components of said arrangement as well as to a computer readable medium comprising program code for executing at least part of the method according to the invention in such an arrangement.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the presently used postal transport systems, such as they are known, for example, from US 2010/0235303 A1 (Lynch; the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference), the mail items (such as letters, packages, parcels etc.) are typically provided with a value marking or a corresponding franking imprint (in the following generally referred to herein as an indicium) that, among other things, serves as evidence for the payment of the necessary transport fees of the selected postal carrier. For this purpose, the value marking or the franking imprint normally contains a series of graphical verification features, for example alphanumeric characters, barcodes etc. that contain indicium information in coded or uncoded form. This information enables it to be determined whether the transport fees have been paid.
After the mail item has been transferred to the postal carrier, the carrier uses the indicium to verify whether the fees necessary for the transport have been paid. If the verification is successful, the postal carrier takes over the transport of the mail piece to the desired location; otherwise, it rejects the item (if applicable).
In many cases so called franking machines integrating a postal security device, a data processing unit and, in some cases, also a printing unit, are used to generate the indicium on a substrate such as the mail piece itself or a label to be connected to the mail piece. In some cases however, separate data processing devices, such as personal computers (PCs) or the like, are used are used to perform parts of the indicium generation for several reasons.
One of these reasons is the limited data processing capacity of special purpose data processing units such as the postal security devices of franking machines. Specific software run on a conventional PC connected to such a postal security device (e.g. of a franking machine) helps tracking and optimizing a customer's mail and postage costs and leverages the customer to take advantage of discounts offered with commercial postage products.
For example, Francotyp Postalia GmbH of Birkenwerder, DE, has released a software called Mailone™ supporting a customer in claiming discounted Commercial Base Pricing (CBP) by printing a delivery confirmation barcode and sending the CBP data to a postal carrier such United States Postal Service (USPS). The Mailone™ software runs on a customer's PC that is connected to a postal security device of a separate franking machine and to a label printer for printing the indicium. The customer's PC receives indicium data from the postal security device and causes the label printer to print a representation of the indicium onto a label which is then connected to the mail piece to be shipped.
It will be appreciated that, in such a configuration with a data processing device (such as a PC) receiving indicium data from a separate postal security device, in cases where there is no secure connection between the data processing device and the postal security device, fraudulent indicium data might be transferred to and printed via the data processing device by an external device simulating to be a valid postal security device. Such a fraudulent simulation might be performed subsequent to an attack unveiling the communication protocol between the data processing device and a valid separate postal security device. By this means, mail pieces with fraudulent indicia might be entered into the mail stream of a carrier forcing the latter to implement a sufficiently high survey ratio of the indicia of its mail stream to prevent undetected fraud.
A further reason for using separate data processing devices in generating printed indicia is the greater flexibility of the user interface provided by such separate data processing devices (e.g. PCs) compared to the user interface typically provided by such franking machines. Hence, with such external or separate data processing devices, typically, more user convenient menus may be displayed and data entry is also rendered more user-friendly.
However, as outlined above, the use of such devices external to the franking machine brings along commercial as well as security problems, for example, when using unauthorized our outdated software which doesn't correspond to the actual requirements of the postal carrier.
Hence, there is a need to be able to specify the services provided by a franking machine to such devices external to the franking machine while at the same time keeping a sufficiently high level of security.